Carrying on from my last post about what is, or isn't romantic, here are two short stories which raise similar questions.
In Denise Rossetti's A Creature of Habit the hero, Colin, knows that
The young women in the office regarded him with affectionate contempt. He knew he didn’t enter their calculations - the spectacles, the bald spot - a man who was too fussy, too flabby, too close to fifty.Denise says that this 'strange little story was born of my belief that there's someone for everyone - and I mean everyone!'. See what you think.
Alison Stuart's Romance and the Single Girl has a meta-romance angle to it. It begins with the heroine, Sarah, reading a romance novel (though she denies her interest when her friend Julie scornfully refers to it as 'this rubbish'). Sarah wants to find romance; Julie thinks men are 'only after one thing'. Researchers for Harlequin's 2007 Romance Report found that 'The vast majority of men (92%) and women (94%) consider themselves at least somewhat romantic' but, all the same,
Sometimes the motivation behind a romantic gesture is less noble than we might hope: those tickets to your favorite ballet or that limited edition baseball card come with an unsaid expectation or a not-so subtle desire for… (surprise, surprise)… SEX. According to our survey results, nearly two out of three men (62%) and more than two in five women (44%) have done something special for someone they were dating because they hoped it would lead to sex.That's not exactly what happens in this story, but nonetheless, events will perhaps cause both of them to have something of a change of attitude.
